About the Religious Tolerance.org website
News and information
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News and information:
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 A new problem: During the middle of 2011, we added the Google + 1 button to the home page and each of our essays. It is a type of "like" button that you are invited to click on if you enjoyed the essay. One appeared at the top of this page ^^^ just under the Religious Tolernace banner. It looked like this:
To the right of the button is a counter indicating the total number of people who clicked on the button.
But about 2012-MAR-14, the button changed to something really weird:
We suspect that most visitors won't have the foggiest notion what the button is for. And so they won't click on it.
We thought that the new button design was an error by Google. We e-mailed our Google Plus 1 contact for help to fix the button. But, judging by a Google website, this new button is exactly what they have designed as their new button. Strange!
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Page pruning: We currently have over 6,000 essays online. Most of them present no problem, because they deal with theological beliefs that change with glacial slowness, or they deal with past history which doesn't change much. But others are problematic, because they require a great deal of effort daily to maintain. Meanwhile our revenue is dropping because of increased competition from other religious websites. This has necessitated a reduction in the number of hours of our part-time staff person. We are going to have to cut back our effort, and decided to drop our news lists. An analysis of our site traffic indicates that few visitors read them, and they consume a lot of our time to maintain them. Dropping them would allow us to concentrate on other topics.
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Donations welcomed: We feel that peace can only come about through advancing religious tolerance and understanding.
If you agree, will you please
consider making a one-time donation via Credit card,
PayPal, or check -- or set up a small monthly donation. We would really appreciate it. More info.
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Page Rank: Google ranks web sites according to their perception of
the site's "importance." They rated themselves, alone, as 10 out of 10; Yahoo is 9;
MSN is 8. This site was 7. Overnight, in early 2009-JAN, they dropped our
"importance" in half to 4. We heard rumors that that they have treated all
web sites with paid text ads in this way. We doubt this, because a tiny text ad on fewer than 1% of our pages should not have reduced our site's "importance" so much.
At the end of 2009-MAY, we removed the text ads throughout the website. During 2010-MAR we noted that our home page's page rank had been restored to 7 -- again for no obvious reason.
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Attacks on our site: We are continually fending off attacks on our
website by a person or persons unknown. So far, all but one have involved
essays dealing with abortion access, equal rights for gays and lesbians or The
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We have experienced at least
two DoS (denial of service) attacks. Their latest technique seems to involve the
hijacking of one of our Email addresses to make mass mailings of spam
describing "Prestige replica watches". If you receive an unsolicited Email
that appears to have come from us, it didn't; please ignore it.
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 Site metrics: During the week ending 2008-APR-26, traffic on this
website reached a hew high. It handled 9.8 million hits, 1.8
million page views, 107 Gigabytes of traffic, and 449,734 visitors. The number of hits is an almost
meaningless number. However, webmasters delight in quoting them because they are
so large in comparison to other numbers.
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Upgrading: We are
systematically reviewing and upgrading some each day until the entire site is
covered. This will reduce our capacity to write new essays, but will increase
the quality of our existing essays.
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This web site is
underfunded:Our traffic
is averages about 1 million
page impressions a week, from about 400,000 visitors during peak periods! This makes us one
of the largest religious web sites on the Internet. Our affiliation with About.com brought us
significant revenue in the fall and winter of 2002. This enabled us to build up a
contingency fund. Since then, our revenue from banner ads has dropped. The result is that
we are losing money during some months. We urge visitors to consider joining our "300 club"
described next.
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THE "300 CLUB:" We encourage visitors to our site
to visit our help page and
arranged to donate $5.00 or more, every month, via their credit card or PayPal. We need a total of 300 contributors
giving $5 per month (or 150 giving $10, etc) in
order to break even financially and fund all of our projects. We are more than
half-way there; we have the equivalent of 163 individuals giving $5. We
deeply appreciate your support. Monies raised will be mainly used to pay
for our ISP base rental, books for our reference library, and our
part-time office manager.
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"Spiritual warfare, with a twist:" Our web site, particularly the sections on abortion and homosexuality, and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) has been under continual attack by abusive hackers. If you see
any missing or mutilated essays, please contact us.
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THIS SITE IS AVAILABLE ON CD: The entire site of over 6,000 essays is
available for purchase
on a CD-ROM
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New essays: Information about recently added essays, those that have been greatly updated essays, and
essays planned for the future is online. |
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